Wednesday, 31 August 2016

Hey friends! So my blog has basically become the place where I unload and go over everything I've been up to over the past couple of months. It's like therapy. You're my (unpaid) therapist now, blog reader ;) Isn't this what blogging used to be, back in the days of LiveJournal? I'm just making blogging old-school again. Yeah.

So the last few months have been intense, exciting, difficult, scary and amazing all at once.

I did my first ever public speaking gig(!!) where I got to talk all about second hand and ethical fashion. The event was a "Second Hand Fashion Parade" hosted by Rozelle Markets and Ciao magazine. I also got to meet a couple of people who follow me on the internet and love my work, which was probably the most fun part of the day!

I have pretty bad general anxiety, and I never want to do anything like this again - I spent the weeks leading up to the event planning how I could get on a plane and run away so I wouldn't have to do it. But at least now that it's done, I know that I CAN do things like this! Because it would be awesome to be able to do stuff like this in the future. Anxiety can bite me.

BIG HAIR NEWS(!) - I am growing out my fringe! My fringe that I have had for the past 10 years (because I never liked my forehead as a teenager and that insecurity carried itself well into my 20s).

I also started dressing more androgenously and I feel more like "myself" wearing more androgenous clothing, but still being girly when I went to. I definitely feel much more confident in myself because of how I am dressing - and that's been awesome.

What else - I started a medicine that I've been trying to get on for about 2 years now (as it's the most modern and therefore expensive medicine for my illness on the market, you're made to try literally every other horrible drug before you can start it!) and even though it's only been a few days since the first infusion, I am already feeling so much stronger and more like "me" again!

The one scary thing about this new medicine is that I'm now SUPER immunosuppressed. Walking around the world without a good immune system to protect you is frickken terrifying. I notice every cough and sneeze. It's like being in a battlefield, and everybody around you is wearing full body armor and bullet-proof vests, and all you've got is a paper shield. But I did get myself some super cute face masks, which have helped me feel a bit better about the whole thing:

I also reached 5 years since my diagnosis. There's a not-insignificant amount of people who never reach the 5-year milestone after being diagnosed, so it was an extremely emotional time for me. The supportive comments that I got from people who don't even know me made me cry. A lot. But they were happy tears!! So thank you if you were one of those people.

Luciano made his first ever appearance on my channel, as a 500K subscriber special! And people's comments about him have made my day! Honestly, sometimes I feel like I'm the only youtuber with a nice, supportive comments section. It scares me to go on the comments section of other youtubers. How did I get so lucky?

Anyway, the video is here and you should watch it because Luci is a super funny human being and I'm so happy that I finally got to share him with the world :)

My younger sibling has also been really sick with chronic pain for the last few months, so that's been taking its toll on me emotionally. Having a sick family member is so distressing - and so of course it's brought up a lot of guilt for all the stress I've put the people who love me through when I'm really sick. *Sigh*. But hey, we all love each other and I think that's the most important thing. I just have to keep telling myself that time heals, and be hopeful that things will get better over time.

So here's some more good news, because that all got pretty serious: I appeared on the cover of my local newspaper, Ciao Magazine! I think that my friends and family probably took about half of all of the copies that went out - they were all very excited about it ;) Being recognized locally for the stuff I do is helping to "legitimize" this as a job for me. There's a lot of stigma that goes with running your own business and being a "youtuber" - a lot of people still don't consider it a real job that you should be proud of! But I put a massive amount of work into what I do so god damn it - I'm going to be proud of my job!